Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi: Envisioned as a new urban model for sculpture parks, this project is located on Seattle?s last undeveloped waterfront property ? an industrial brownfield site sliced by train tracks and an arterial road. The design connects three separate sites with an uninterrupted Z-shaped ?green? platform, descending forty feet from the city to the water, capitalizing on views of the skyline and Elliott Bay, and rising over existing infrastructure to reconnect the urban core to the revitalized waterfront.
Photography: Benjamin Benschneider
Formerly owned by Union Oil of California (Unocal), the area was used as an oil transfer facility. Before construction of the park, over 120,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed. The remaining petroleum contaminated soil is capped by a new landform with over 200,000 cubic yards of clean fill, much of it excavated from the Seattle Art Museum?s downtown expansion project. Winner of an international design competition, the design for the Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi capitalizes on the forty-foot grade change from the top of the site to the water?s edge. Photography: Paul Warchol
Planned as a continuous landscape that wanders from the city to the shoreline, this Z-shaped hybrid landform provides a new pedestrian infrastructure. Built with a system of mechanically stabilized earth, the enhanced landform re-establishes the original topography of the site, as it crosses the highway and train tracks ...